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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores rebel ideas of governance through a study of an Anyanya and Sudan People’s Liberation Army rebel-run school on the South Sudan-Uganda borderlands over the 1960s-2000s. It argues that African rebel pedagogy provides a new route into wartime ideas of authority, rights and order.

Paper long abstract:

In 2016, new work on conflict studies has called for a renewed focus on rebel governance. But most new research focuses on armed groups' recruitment strategies and violent control of civilians.

This paper takes a broader lens, through a case history of community education in a historic 'rebel territory' on the Uganda-South Sudan border. The organization of education has long been intrinsic to rebel recruitment and mobilization. But unlike research in South America and Southeast Asia, there are almost no studies of rebel-run educational projects in Africa: literature on African education primarily focuses on state education.

Based on new fieldwork and archival research, this paper focuses on a campus near Madi Opei in north-east Uganda, where multiple South Sudanese rebel groups have organized 'rebel' schools and administrative / political training institutes since the 1960s. These guerrilla-teachers' syllabi and curricula were self-made, using various technologies (songs, tape recorders, typewriters and photocopiers), cuttings from international media and human rights reports, and lines and imagery from rebel radio and propaganda, in creative and often subversive ways. This unstudied political pedagogy aimed to make rebel ideas of new political orders, guerrilla administrative structures, and the violent practices and ultimate aims of the civil war legible and learnable to a new generation of 'liberated citizens.'